Foresters in the Gironde must pull 4 to 5 million tonnes of burnt maritime pine out of the forest before insects claim it, a volume close to a full year of intake for the mills that surround the massif. That is according to Francois Guiraud, president of the maritime pine trade body CIPM, who said emergency felling is now underway across the 42,000 hectares the megafire affected.
“Evacuate the stocks so as not to feed the bark beetle, nor the fire,” Gironde prefect Sophie Brocas said of an operation that must also drop every weakened stem threatening a road or a housing estate.
Weakened pine is what the stenographer bark beetle breeds in, with the insect boring through bark into the trunk of a stressed tree, cutting the sap channels, and killing what the fire only scorched.
“Careful not to superimpose two crises,” Guiraud said of a second threat, the pine nematode found in the neighbouring Landes department late in 2025, whose beetle vector is drawn to burnt timber.
The estate carrying that risk is the largest in France, with the Landes de Gascogne covering 1.2 million hectares across Gironde, Landes, and Lot-et-Garonne, and 80 per cent of it planted to maritime pine. A separate fire at Biscarrosse took another 3,600 hectares from 23 July.
Nouvelle-Aquitaine employs close to 60,000 people in the wood sector and turns over more than €10 billion, ranking it third in the region and accounting for nearly 90 per cent of France’s maritime pine.
How much of the salvage is worth milling remains open, because thick bark protects some scorched stems well enough for certain sawmills and paper plants but not others, and silviculture contractors are already drawing partial unemployment while the felling runs.
Guiraud takes his reassurance from earlier disasters, because storms Klaus in 2009 and Xynthia in 2010 put far larger windthrow volumes through the same mills, and the sector absorbed them, though he still expects the wood market to suffer as that volume arrives at once.
“Only pine is happy here,” Bruno Lafon, president of fire defence association DFCI Aquitaine and mayor of Biganos, said of a massif where he considers felling 2,000 hectares preferable to losing 40,000, and where 92 per cent of the area is privately owned.
Guiraud names prevention as the unlearned lesson of 2022, with clearing obligations near houses ignored and drainage ditches left uncut across the four years between the two megafires.
“The problem is not maritime pine itself but that the forest is extremely dry,” Sylvain Delzon, a plant ecophysiologist at the University of Bordeaux, said of sandy soils that hold no water, in a defence of the species against the monoculture charge.
Arthur Guerin-Turcq, a geographer at Sorbonne University who owns a forest at Saumos where the megafire started, places the blame on the way trees are grown rather than the trees, arguing that intensive monoculture is what must be questioned and that refusing to replant near villages would break a taboo.
President Emmanuel Macron has called for a different forest to be replanted and rebuilt, and whatever goes back into the sand now decides what the mills cut in forty years, with Brocas giving the profession until September to answer. Deputies from across the parties tabled a bill on adapting forest policy to climate change on 23 July, one day after the fire started, and the sustainable development committee has held it ever since.
